This post is a short response to Feona Attwood’s paper that she gave at a porn studies workshop today in Gorizia, Italy. The workshop (part of a series that I am also presenting at) is one of the 4 strands that make up the International Film Studies Spring School – part of FilmForum – an international conference on Film Studies.

Feona’s current work focuses on pornography and national identity – namely Britishness. She references the bawdy postcards such as those of Donald McGill that have so long been a feature of the great British seaside and magazines like Fiesta and Razzle to demonstrate the class dimension (obsession) of British porn and the ways in which a particular British style is cultivated within imagery that references it’s national context here.

During her presentation Feona made reference to several websites such as CHAV-VAN and Chavley Court that provide access to this kind of material and what was particularly interesting to me was the aesthetics used on these sites. I have written elsewhere about the aesthetics of gay male porn sites and in particular the ways in which aesthetics not only represent the type of sex available on a particular site but also helps to frame the representations and invite particular understandings of the space.

Unsurprisingly the sites Feona referenced looked different. Surprisingly though, the design aesthetic was rather – unusual. Lots of fluorescent colours, rather tacky 1980s fonts and a page layout that looks like it was dreamt up using software from around the same time. It felt, inshort, that the web designer was watching back-to-back episodes of Only Fools and Horses in the background while working on these sites.

I say this with complete acknowledgement of the class implications of such a statement – and that, in a sense, is my whole point. We need to think a lot more about the way in which porn – such as British porn – is packaged and disseminated online. There is something wonderfully ‘crap’ about the design features of this site. About the way in which it self-reflexively draws upon a longer British history of revelling in ‘not being the best’ in being a bit naff, in being a bit crap.

This celebration – or rather not celebration because that’s a bit too over the top for British culture – this doffing of one’s cap to crapness can be found in other parts of British culture. I am thinking here of the ‘stocking filler’ book titles such as Crap Towns and sites dedicated to Crap British Stuff and newspaper articles that rejoice in ‘Crap Days Out‘

If, as Feona (but also Anna Span) claim, British porn is about the cheeky and the joyously playful vulgar then I think it is also about a certain level self-deprecation, of self-reflexivity regarding this facet of the British cultural psyche that I think many British people would identify (and identify with) as British.